My life with Paul Schreber

Abstract

Freud's 1911 and Niederland's 1959 problematic interpretations of Schreber's Memoirs set off a flood of secondary literature. In both selected facts were paired with a plethora of fictions. The narratives of Schreber father and son were misdescribed, misdiagnosed, and misinterpreted, errors have been uncritically copied by commentators ever since. Freud's theory of homosexuality as a cause of paranoia has not stood the test of time. In 1963 Niederland himself stated that the data he collected on Schreber father and son do not explain Schreber's second illness. A further misconception was to totalize both Schreber as person and the content of his book as psychotic, controverted by the fact that Schreber recovered by 1897 and the book is a creative essay with a profound moral message. Schreber's hermaphroditic fantasies were neither homosexual desires toward psychiatrist Flechsig nor morbid delusions but images of an identification with or compassion for his wife who suffered repeated miscarriages and stillbirths. The author revisits the description, diagnosis, dynamics, and deontology of Schreber's story from the perspective of dramatology and narratology and adds new information and insights. The goal of this essay is not only historical, but also a clinical and practical approach to fantasy and delusion.

Key words:

• psychosis
• paranoia
• homosexuality
• fantasy
• delusion
• depression
• enactment

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Correction

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2021.1953933)

Notes

1 Freud is partially agreeing with me: “The great Napoleon obtained a divorce from Josephine … because she could not propagate the dynasty. Dr. Schreber may have formed a phantasy that if he were a woman he would manage the business of having children more successfully … [via] the feminine attitude towards his father” (Freud, 1911, p. 58).

2 Busse based his theory that Schreber suffered from syphilis on this chart note during the first admission to Flechsig’s hospital in 1884: “Treated with potassium iodide because syphilis was suspected. Wife had two miscarriages.” Schreber’s autopsy showed no syphilis (Lothane, 2004, pp. 596–598). At that time, prior to the discovery of Treponema pallidum in 1905 by Fritz Schaudinn, doctors suspected that infected sperm can pass into the fetus and cause miscarriages (Lothane, 2004, p. 65, citing Liebreich, 1896–1900, p. 756). In his 1990 dissertation Busse reproduced a poem Schreber had composed in 1888 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his wedding with Sabine where these lines can be read:

Four times your ardent wish

For sweet motherhood…remained unfulfilled!...

I myself became ill: out of seeds (Keime, also germs) barely noted

An illness grew and hard days followed.

It did not affect the body alone: the mind was also deranged (pp. 334-335).

Busse alleged in section “4.1 Gustav, Lues, and the anxiety about ‘brain softening’” (pp. 250-258) that Paul Schreber meant syphilis and concluded: “subsequent to the Reichstag election Schreber must have also displayed symptoms that strongly resembled syphilis so that the doctor prescribed treatment with potassium iodide…and there was the further inference that one already believed that the patient was in the last, tertiary stage of the disease” (p. 255). However, Busse also cited the opinion of the noted historian of psychoanalysis Gerhard Fichtner that “The word Keime had neither then nor today the specific meaning of an infectious agent. In other words: I believe that this line in the poem is neither evidence for the issue of syphilis nor anxiety over a syphilitic infection (Letter of 15.1.1990” (p. 257).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry Zvi Lothane

Henry (Zvi) Lothane, MD, is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA, Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytical Association, and honorary member of the Polish Psychiatric Society. He is the author of In Defense of Schreber: Soul murder and psychiatry (1992) and the German expanded version (2004), and papers on the life and work of Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942). He currently has a new Spielrein book in production.